Love dim sum? There’s a food festival for that

(Image: Hisakazu Watanabe/Flickr)

Yum Cha! is the latest expression of Toronto’s newest up-and-coming dining trend, made popular by chefs like Susur Lee and Chantecler’s Jonathan Poon: trendy dim sum.

The daylong food fest, which comes to Chinatown on April 13, will bring together 10 Toronto chefs, including local masters of Chinese cuisine Nick Liu, whose Asian brasserie GwaiLo is soon to open on College Street, and Wing Li, who won “Best Dim Sum Pastries” at last year’s International Cantonese cooking championships. They’ll be serving innovative takes on traditional dim-sum snacks, like dumplings and steamed buns, which attendees can wash down with Sam Adams beer and mixed drinks from a dedicated cocktail cart.

For Torontonians feeling wary of food festival crowds, the organizers of Yum Cha! are making a few promises: a strictly capped attendance list, for one, as well as manageable wait times and “an enjoyable ratio of guests to vendors”—all things that were pretty much taken for granted before last month’s grilled-cheese-fest fiasco.